Cross-Border Capacity Planning in Air Traffic Management Under Uncertainty.

The article focuses on optimizing capacity planning and sharing in European air traffic management (ATM) to reduce costs associated with flight delays and reroutings caused by demand and capacity uncertainties. It proposes a novel capacity sharing scheme allowing flexible deployment of some capacity across airspaces within alliances at increased unit costs, modeled as a two-stage newsvendor problem solved via a stochastic simulation optimization approach. Tested on a large-scale case study covering around 3,000 flights across Western Europe, the stochastic method outperforms a deterministic benchmark by significantly lowering expected network costs and improving stability. The study further evaluates three capacity sharing designs—within the same air navigation service provider (ANSP), cross-border among ANSPs, and among ANSPs sharing the same technology provider—finding that cross-border sharing yields the highest cost savings (up to 8.4%), though benefits depend on alliance structure, traffic intensity, and technological compatibility. The findings highlight that improved capacity planning mainly benefits scheduled flights, while capacity sharing flexibility predominantly aids nonscheduled flights, and that practical implementation considerations such as political acceptability and technology differences influence the effectiveness of capacity sharing.